View of Blue Hill with the current cell tower from Hudson River School painter Fredrick Church's historic home Olana on Thursday Sept. 19, 2013 in Hudson, N.Y. There is a proposal for a larger tower that may affect the viewshed. (Michael P. Farrell/Times Union) less

View of Blue Hill with the current cell tower from Hudson River School painter Fredrick Church's historic home Olana on Thursday Sept. 19, 2013 in Hudson, N.Y. There is a proposal for a larger tower that may ... more

If Hudson River School landscape artist Frederic Church were alive today and at his easel painting distant Blue Hill from the grounds of his 19th-century Olana estate, he would likely omit the metal communications towers crowning its summit.

But for the communities that surround the beautiful 300-plus-acre tourist attraction with stunning river and mountain vistas that Church dubbed the "center of the world," those towers represent safety. They are essential to the modern emergency services communications networks communities now need.

And so, the battle lines are drawn.

Olana and its supporters are fighting a plan by farmer Mark Eger, who owns land on the hill two miles southeast of the estate, to replace the two 190-foot towers there now with one that is the same height but six times wider. The existing two towers are aligned in such a way as to look like one as seen from Olana.

Some 30-plus fire companies, Columbia County and the Taconic Hills Central School District have endorsed the plan as necessary to upgrade their emergency communications equipment, some of which dates to the 1960s.

In July, the town of Livingston, in which the towers are located, approved the proposal by Eger Communications to build the replacement tower and to site fire and school antennas as well as private mobile communications company equipment on it.

Last month, the Olana Partnership and Scenic Hudson sued the town, aiming to get it to reconsider the plan.

"We are completely in support of emergency services, but it has never been made clear to us why that particular site is necessary for a tower," Sara Griffen, president of Olana Partnership, said one recent day while walking to the hilltop mansion.

Rick Viebrock, supervisor of transportation for Taconic Hills, said the school district needs the new tower to talk to its bus drivers. The district can now talk to about 70 percent of its buses in the field, and the location of the hill and a new tower will be an improvement.

"Tests which were performed over the last two years have proven that with the inclusion of a radio repeater on Blue Hill tower, our radio system can service almost 100 percent of our district and keep us in contact with all of our buses at all times," Viebrock said in a letter to the Planning Board.

Columbia County also endorsed the project, saying it is a necessary component to its multiyear program to upgrade its low-band radios with high-band equipment.

John Howe, county fire coordinator, said the response of 14 fire companies and 100 firefighters to last year's fire in Ghent at the TCI plant, which disposed of electrical equipment, exposed inadequacies in the current system that a new tower would cure.

"At the height of the incident, a number of explosions occurred," Howe stated in a letter to the Planning Board. "Due to the limitations of our current radio system, the incident commanders were unable to properly warn and account for all of the firefighters in a timely manner."

"There would be no measurable increase in visibility," Murray said. "We, however, would be willing to paint it any color that they think will make it blend into the sky."

Murray said it is the town's and Eger's contention that the partnership can raise no legitimate legal concerns.

Olana wants the town to do a more thorough environmental review of the matter, according to a copy of its lawsuit filed in County Court Aug. 15.

"The Planning Board's review of the tower's potential significant environmental impacts was cursory, was improperly influenced by generalized opinions from the tower's supporters, and failed to take a 'hard look' at the potential effects of the tower as required by the state Environmental Quality Review Act," the lawsuit states.

For someone standing in the side yard of Cosy Cottage, Frederic and Isabel Church's first home built in 1861 at the site they called "the Farm," the existing towers are clearly visible rising above the trees on the completely forested hill. Church, who lived from 1826 to 1900, would sit in the yard and paint the rolling countryside and fruit orchards he planted with the hill in the background.

"The hill features prominently in eight to 10 of his paintings," Griffen said. "We were told dishes mounted on the new tower could be as large as eight feet in diameter."

The verdant green canvas exists due to the work of the partnership and others to secure conservation easements from surrounding land owners, but three large radio and television antennas along the river in Catskill clearly visible from the main house rise over Dutchmen's Landing to the southeast and a cement plant jetty to the south.

"We don't necessarily expect to have completely pristine views," Griffen said. "But this was Church's genius and part of America's first art movement and needs to be preserved any way possible."